رغْدُ العَيْش’s Reviews > A Short Stay in Hell > Status Update

“We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over.

…

“All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of
thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth?

…

“What creatures of habit we are. After only a few nights in Hell we had settled into a comfortable routine.”

“There’s a second-by-second account of our lives, probably in multiple volumes, a minute-by-minute account, an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day. There’s one that covers the events of our lives as viewed by our mothers, one by our fathers, one by our neighbors, one by our dogs. There must be thousands of our biographies here”

“When I was looking at these, I was
thinking about a lifetime spent reading great works of literature. Now I get it – this is Hell; an eternity surrounded by books, but they’re all nonsense.”